162 - David Barnett - Pop Sockets - Part 1

The Daily Drive is a podcast for entrepreneurs, marketers, sales people, leaders, and any person seeking success.

Listen to Part 1 of The Daily Drive podcast with David Barnett, the CEO of Pop Sockets.

Bio:

David Barnett is the founder and CEO of PopSockets LLC. He was a philosophy major at Emory, a physics major at CU-Boulder, received his PhD in philosophy from NYU, and from 2005-2015 was a philosophy professor at CU-Boulder. His research specialized in philosophy of language and philosophy of mind, before he reached enlightenment and became an entrepreneur. In 2010, Barnett was looking to stop his earbud cord from getting tangled and achieved this by gluing two buttons to the back of his phone and wrapping the earbud cord around the buttons. As ugly as the buttons were, they worked. In the course of improving on the idea, he developed about 60 different prototypes, making the buttons expand and collapse via an accordion mechanism, so that they could function as both a stand and a grip. In 2012, Barnett launched a Kickstarter campaign for an iPhone case with two PopSockets grips integrated into the case. In addition to getting successfully funded, the KickStarter campaign enabled Barnett to show the world his dancing prowess. Two years later, in 2014, Barnett launched the business out of his garage in Boulder, Colorado, and has subsequently sold over 140 million PopSockets grips around the world.